Failing to notice (cold, cold) reality

Failure

1. Writing an adventure story
2. My seventh form art folio
3. Being a rock star
4. Looking cool
5. Being a poet
6. Being a playwright
7. Being an academic
8. Writing a novel
9. Having a wildly successful blog

Here is a dull way to start a post:

It shows unemploment rates in  New Zealand from 1986 to 2009.  The green  line is the unemployment rate for people over 19 years  of age, and the blue line is the youth unemployment rate.  As it happens this is a very important piece of information when it comes to my life story.

When I finished  high school at the end of 1990 I decided that I would get a part time job, save some money, and then go to France.  I would do this with a friend of mine,  and while we were in France we would get part time jobs, travel and I would do things like write poetry.   As you can see  this was a cast-iron, well thought out and totally idiot-proof plan firmly based in reality.  Without going  into all of the reasons that this was never, ever,  ever going to work, let’s go back to the graph.

With the exception of right now, the worst time for a youth to look for a job in the last twenty-five years was between  1991 and 1995.  In 1991 I was a fellow with no work experience, questionable fashion sense, a quiet and mumbly personality, and bursary.  The amazing  thing  is that I actually got two job interviews.  One was for the Government Press, and the other for a travel agency.   I was unsuccessful in both cases.  This little brush with job  hunting taught me  two things about failure.  Firstly, you really need to be aware of  your environment before you pour your energies into a project.  It would have been useful for me to have read the newspaper in 1991 and discover the youth unemployment rate’s historic high.   Secondly, on the whole if you are going to do well in something  you need to be able to sell yourself to a certain extent.  This was surprising  new information for me in 1991.  I suppose I had envisaged life as being a series of opening  doors, and was shocked to discover that  you not only had to get off your arse and go and knock at doors yourself, but that most of those doors would remain closed,  and  if they opened at all it would only be a crack and you would have to talk your way in.

So I did what  any sensible chap would do at this point: I went  back to school and stayed there for a long  time.

Actually looking back on these six months at the beginning of 1991 I think I learned a lot about life.  I was on the dole at that time.  I sometimes have students at  my school who tell me they are going to leave school when they are 16 and go on the dole and that it will be sweet getting free money for doing nothing.  In my experience  it was sweet  for about a month and then it was crap.  Mainly it was crap because I had dreams (the  go to France thing), and the dole in no way allowed you access to those dreams, but it was also crap because I lost touch with all of my friends who were off doing exciting things at university while I went stagnant, and  because reporting to my Employment Officer at Work and Income, and looking through the  job listings,  and  getting rejection letters every week was a soul destroying process that made me feel worthless.

Nevermind, in these difficult times before I scurried off to university halfway through 1991, I had recourse to poetry.  For some reason I have  kept the notebook where I wrote out all of the “good” copies of my poems from this time.  My god it is bad.  Bad,  bad,  bad.  It is so bad I hestitate to put any of it here, but this would be cheating.  So here we go.  Two representative pieces.  I had only two themes it would seem (both cliched).  One was unrequited love, and the other was generalised anger at society and feeling that life was meaningless.

Untitled (II)

Do you watch  the games I play            (soccer?)

Did you see what I say                             (did I what now?)

I felt like falling at your feet

If I thought you would see                  (but otherwise forget it)

I can say I love you today

And wait and see what you say

If I’m waiting it’s raining

May I stand in your eyes and shine?      

 (sound of retching from audience)

Sorry.  One  more.  This one is about being misunderstood (man).

I believe

Don’t you come across trying to analyse me

I’m a man  that’s  all I’ll ever be

I don’t even know who I am

How can  you pretend to understand?

Don’t give me your meaningful stares

I’ve got passions, more than you could bear

I feel like a stone with a heart inside

I’m burning up but I’m cold in your eyes.

Oh  boy. 

Firstly let me say that these poems are not addressed to anyone in particular.  Not the horrible, vomit-inducing “love” poem, or the laughable crappiness of the nobody-understands-me poem.  My favourite line is “I’m a man that’s all I’ll ever be”.  It makes me laugh out loud every time I reread it.  The follow up line  is pretty good too giving us the one-two punch  of “this is what I am/I don’t know what I am”.  I also quite like how both poems really rise to the occasion at the end.  That whole rain/shine, stone/heart, burning/cold thing is awesome.

The failure here  is clear.  It is the inexperienced writer resorting to hackneyed ideas.  I abandoned poetry and went into lyric writing  at which I was a bit better  (but not much).

Many years later I went on a creative writing  course  for secondary school students and  their teachers.  Before we went we were asked to write a poem  about a piece of clothing,  and a short story about an animal.  When we  were  there we were split into groups and shared our poems  and stories with each other.  I am a great fan of the poem  I wrote for this exercise, which coincidentally was  about the period that I have covered in the last couple of posts and the leather jacket I am wearing in the Jim Morrison post.  I was sufficiently encouraged by my peers to send it off to a literary magazine, but it was rejected – “quite good of its type, but not original” – which was wounding  enough  for me to retreat completely from the field.  Handling rejection is another thing I am bad at, and a very important  thing you can  learn  from  failure, but this will be in the next post.

Anyway, here is the poem.

I loved my leather jacket

I gave it to my now vanished friend

back when I was a lizard 

king,  back when I  thought

I could do anything

before I got fat, old and bald

before I found I was not at all

the hooligan  I wanted to become

but preferred quiet nights in

reading.

Time has failed to be kind (2/2)

Failure

1. Writing an adventure story
2. My seventh form art folio
3. Being a rock star
4. Looking cool
5. Being a poet
6. Being a playwright
7. Being an academic
8. Writing a novel
9. Having a wildly successful blog

All you need to know about 1991 is that The Doors directed by Oliver Stone was released.

It would be an understatement to say that this movie had a big impact on me.  I remember going to see it with all my university mates at the Regent, and being so overwhelmed that when I staggered out at the end I actually had to sit down again on the steps and try and deal with it.  My head was spinning.  I had seen who I wanted to be, and that person was Jim Morrison.

I quickly began to investigate The Doors and Jim.

All purchased in 1991.

The stuff that really blew my mind was the whole idea of poetry and rock and roll and theatre blended into these epic ten or fifteen  minute songs like The End and When the Music’s Over.  I also loved all the stuff The Doors did after Jim died with his spoken voice  and their backing tracks.  For a while I was convinced that he actually was a poet.  I bought his poems and studied them.  I lent  this book  to a friend  whose mother found it in his bedroom, picked it up  and read  the following:

f*&ked  with the negroes

in cabs of the drivers

F&*ked little infants of North

Indo-China

Branded with napalm  and  screaming

in pain

Which I think might have been Jim’s anaylsis of the Western war machine, but didn’t impress friend’s mum who asked him to remove the book from her house and never let it cross her threshold again.

So, because of Jim, I wanted to be a poet, and a rock star, but I also wanted to look something  like him.  Which had obvious problems.

The orginal:

And me:

I’m not sure what’s going on with the shirt because I usually wore sort of paisley shirts open to the belly button with a t-shirt underneath and a couple of long necklaces flapping around.  One of the necklaces was even  the utterly conventional jewellery of the desperate to be unconventional: the peace sign.

Somehow it just never works: this desire to copy your heroes.  Whole industries are made out of it though.  You see the glamour and the fashion writ large in a movie, or in a magazine, and you try to emulate it out of the bargain racks at Farmers, or some cast off at a second hand store.  Jim  Morrison  stalks through your consciousness,  a silky poet of the shadows, while you plod through suburban Karori in sweaty cowboy boots and get told off by your mum for not mowing the lawns.

I “achieved” this look for all of about six months before the gods got a hold of me.  Firstly, I had started wearing contact lenses, mainly so that  I could wear sunglasses, and  picked  up a really bad dose of conjunctivitis which meant that I not only had crusty, watering eyes but that I had to give up contact lenses (and sunglasses) and go back to glasses.  Let me tell you, there is no way that you can wear sunglasses over a normal pair of glasses and look cool.  No way.  

Secondly, my premature balding picked up pace.  Again, no way you can look cool with long hair and bald patches.  Forget it.  My hairdresser said the best thing to do when you started to bald was to get really short hair cuts.  I followed her advice.

So now I was a guy wearing all this Jim Morrison gear with a short hair cut and glasses.  Sort of like a desperately sad accountant going to a rock concert.

Then came one of the few moments  in my life when I actually had an epiphany.  Not a religious one, but one where you suddenly realise something and make a radical change.  I was walking  from my mother’s house to the bus stop to catch the bus to university and I developed this odd feeling.  For a while I couldn’t figure out  what  the feeling was, and then  I realised that it was the feeling  you get when you realise you look like a total knob.  I mentally went through  everything I was wearing:

• Biker jacket (but you’re not a biker)
• Pirate shirt (but you’re not a pirate)
• Peace necklace (but you don’t give a toss about peace)
• Cowboy boots (but you’re not a cowboy)

I stopped, turned around, walked home and  took it all off.

Which was probably a good thing because I was never going to be Jim Morrison.  Failing to become Jim Morrison gave me a chance  to start becoming John-Paul.

Not that abandoning Jim made the fashion road any easier:

I  think this look could be called “Don Johnson at the wine bar”.  I used to love this jacket.  I thought it was dead sophisticated.  Unfortunately for this jacket – aside from the fact that it was white – it had shoulder pads which tended to look a bit ridiculous.  Nevertheless, even  though this particular outfit is a bit silly it was more or less where fashion was taking me after Jim had been  jettisoned: down the dark path towards normality.

Where I am happy now.  In my jacket and tie.

I am always pleased when a student  in one of my classes shows up with a ridiculous hairstyle, or wears the most outlandish possible fashion to mufti day.  It is as it should be.  The young laughing at the old; the old laughing at the young.